This dissertation examines women's colleges emergence as new organizational types in higher education in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In building these colleges, administrators both deviated from societal norms and values about gender and race while conforming to others. They pushed for women's place in advanced education without betraying…

This dissertation investigates the issue of gender stratification within engineering and other STEM-related fields. The dissertation is divided into three articles that address different aspects of the problem and propose potential solutions. Article 1 explores the persistent gender imbalance within STEM fields, particularly in engineering and…

This dissertation investigates the historical and socio-cultural dynamics of Korean international students in American higher education from 1945 to 2020. It explores the local motivations and global trajectories that have shaped patterns of student mobility over the decades, focusing on how social structures and changes influence individual and…

Perceptions and expectations of masculinity in the United States create difficult conditions for men to discuss the pressures they feel around performing masculinity practices. By remaining relatively silent about these pressures, men secure greater access to material and ideological benefits promised through the patriarchal dividend. The…

This dissertation explores the social, institutional, and structural conditions believed to be at the center of the racial disparities that influence access and participation within secondary and post-secondary environments of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. More specifically, this study investigates the…

This study, a multisite qualitative case study, examines the responses of three institutions of higher education to normative disruption of the gender binary. Normative disruption, or the challenging of the social status quo, occurs when power structures in society are pushed back against. Central to this study is the use of open systems theory,…

This dissertation study addresses the gaps in research concerning the gendered experiences of successful Latino men in higher education. As Latino men in postsecondary education continue to enroll and persist in low numbers, new lenses are needed to consider their educational experiences. This study attempts to add a gendered lens, in the form of…

With a considerable focus to increase America's degree completion rates amongst our diverse population, higher education policymakers and researchers have examined the college access, persistence, and completion rates of first-generation students. However, minimal research has addressed the heterogeneous student population through a gendered or…

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to understand how being both Black and male (i.e., Black male intersectionality) shaped the lived experiences and academic success of high-achieving Black male undergraduates in engineering majors at a predominantly White institution (PWI). Consistent with prior research, high-achieving was…

In this dissertation I examine the patterns and uses of transgressive humor and sexual talk that male traders from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) indulge in when at their leisure from trading. I investigate how cultural conceptualizations or ideologies are brought into the present moment through discursive interaction and how the cultural signs…

This research contributes to a body of literature that looks for effective responses to the gendered performance gap, the research into the effects of single-sex education, and the social construction of masculinities. This qualitative inquiry focuses on a bounded group of male students who graduated from New England single-sex high schools and…

The twenty-first century presents many new challenges in career development and choices in the workforce for men and women. Currently, women comprise nearly half of the United States labor force. United States women are employed in various career areas, ranging from the traditional careers for women, such as education and secretarial, to their…

Since the mid-twentieth century, a shift in demographics of those attending higher education institutions has resulted in increased attention to underrepresented students and their development, specifically their social identities, including race (Cross, 1991), gender (Gilligan, 1982), and sexual orientation (Cass, 1979; D'Augelli, 1994;…

This multiple case study explored how the literate experiences of six African American men influenced their perceptions of and engagement with a community-based adult basic education and literacy (ABEL) program in a large northeastern city. The theoretical framework included a social practices view of literacy and a constructivist view of…

As the "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001" and high-stakes accountability have come to define the work of teachers, one wonders if "teaching" is becoming more or less attractive. Teaching in today's classrooms is arguably very different from teaching in classrooms from previous decades and generations. Moreover, the…